Compared to What?
June 3, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Someone I’m close to who’d been upset about her 401k losses, said she’s now feeling a lot better about it. The reason: everyone else has lost the same percentage, so its relative.
Its an interesting exercise to notice how much of our thinking is relative. By relative I mean judging and responding to the events in our personal and business lives in comparison to others’ lives, or in comparison to our own lives, as we remember or anticipate them. This occurs so frequently that its considered natural. But when you challenge it in yourself, and in your organization and culture, you become aware of the negative results that follow:
- scarcity - more for you means less for me
- exclusiveness - keeping you / them out
- superiority / inferiority
- withholding / protectiveness
Transformational change takes place at least partially in the absolute, where no boundaries exist between or among us. Social business models and tools provide a great staging area for personal and organizational transformation but only if there’s willingness to be conscious of, and to act upon what’s true for and in us all.
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Hedging Life
April 19, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
The recent results on ongoing genome studies, report that they have far less predictive value than believed, or as one geneticist commented “The information has little or in many cases no clinical relevance.”
So this is my layperson’s oversimplified, reading between the lines interpretation: the genome race is largely based on building complex risk models using shaky data. The industries and businesses that use these models make their revenue and profit by selling products and services that hedge health risks that probably don’t exist because the models are bogus.
For me, as I read this, there’s an eerie sense of similarity to the hubris-driven financial industries that pushed the global economy off a cliff “because we can”. One can imagine a human DNA Ponzi scheme.
Bill Clinton eloquently warns us “Don’t bet against America.” We need to go further. We need to stop betting against nature with our scientific and technological advancements and use these gifts with reverence to advance our civilization.
Many would shoot down reverent capitalism as an oxymoron. I’m not buying it, and neither is nature.
Getting People To Use Sharepoint
March 4, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
When I was putting together the accompanying slides, a Seth Godin post kept popping into mind. This blog post was about email marketing, with and without permission. What stuck with me was his analogy that without permission, a marketer interrupts him at his email, which is where he lives, all day.
A powerful image. 
What must it feel like, I thought, for an employee who will need to change to a system like Sharepoint, that bypasses not just email, but also the personalized explorer and file storage system relied upon for years, or longer. It could feel much worse than being interrupted at home, and more like a home invasion.
That could a good place to start if you’re failing in your efforts to get more people using Sharepoint. Resistant peoples’ responses to change will be different, including: protectiveness, skepticism and abject fear. But those who are resistant will need time, space and your leadership skills and natural influence to get from where they are (home!) to where you want and need them to be. And that is the place of willingness.
Leading Through Resistance
February 6, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Whether you’re leading a company of one or hundreds through a period of uncertainty and change, you’ll reach a point where action is required yet met with resistance, even after a period of time to adapt to uncertainty.
A default response is fighting resistance with more resistance through boundaries, control and force of will. Lines get drawn for self-protection but backfire, further increasing fear, anxiety and hostility.
A different response is to meet resistance, and replace structures that no longer exist, by committing to and modeling for others the highest possible attention to quality in, and respect for doing what’s in front of you to do, including: making decisions, communications, actions and interactions.
Attention to quality may be easier and more expected and accepted in some areas, like providing customer service and team-building. In other areas it may be more challenging, for example: cutting costs, letting people go, dealing with financial loss and making downwardly mobile lifestyle changes.
In every case, attention to quality and respect means there’s awareness. Awareness is not a strategy, its a practice. You practice by noticing when negative beliefs, assumptions or expectations compromise your commitment to quality and respect for the humanity in yourself and others. These contradictory thoughts lose their power over you when you’re aware of them.
When that happens, you’re conscious that how you respond to challenges now, directs where you’re going and how great that experience will be for you, your business, your clients and your community and beyond.
Leading with Presence when Nothing is Certain
January 23, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Leave a Comment
Leadership programs have helped executives be empathetic to employees facing organizational change. Soft skills help change leaders give employees the time and space to wander around in a jungle of uncertainty until they’re ready to accept new models, systems and structures.
That uncertainty is now magnified as the world’s financial, economic and business foundations have shifted beneath us. Uncertainty is no longer a place on the path to something different. It is the path.
For today’s leaders - of organizations, teams, start-ups and even solo professional and creative firms (self-leadership) - its all the more important to increase self-awareness and presence in order to hold the space for events to unfold, and for people to adapt.
Holding space, or presence leadership might sound counter-intuitive to habitual change responses that attempt to reduce confusion. Those typically include more doing, telling, reacting, trying to “make things happen” through force of will, jumping to conclusions about the future and making assumptions about the past.
But confusion results when people believe they don’t know something they should know, or need to know. Confusion will be reduced or eliminated only when that belief is replaced by unconditional acceptance of uncertainty.
Presence leaders will communicate and model how this acceptance is a pivotal point of power (not weakness). In doing so, they naturally influence people in their organization to see themselves as cause, not effect, and to be poised for the best, not resigned to the worst.
The jungle metaphor transforms to a still mysterious, but friendlier, supportive and more orderly place where people can wander, but not be lost.
Communications Leadership in Challenging Situations
January 15, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Leave a Comment
Times of increased stress and anxiety provide a great staging area for self-aware communication. Although Its increasingly important to nurture relationships, create natural influence and expand social capital, anxiety and stress means more conflicts, misunderstandings and more chances to turn people off.
Its not always the result of a big argument or conflict. Turn-off can be the cumulative result of, subtle, one-word put-downs (”whatever” and “obviously” come to mind), or interrupting and cutting off others.
The effect is to verbally slam the door on people who quickly back off from, or avoid you. The consequent feelings of rejection and insecurity increase fear and accelerate the cycle through which what is expressed constantly contradicts what is desired: that is, connection, acknowledgment, appreciation and understanding.
When mindfulness is neglected in personal and professional conversations and interactions, social equity can quickly slide into a negative balance state. The overdraft, and the unconscious communication habit, can be cured.
There’s a lot of emphasis placed on increasing social IQ in order to better pick up on the subtle cues people exhibit when they negatively respond to you. These are good intuitive skills to learn, but paradoxically, the negative response is often exactly the thing that’s unconsciously desired.
There’s a hidden payoff when words result in the other person feeling threatened, unfairly accused, rejected, discounted, marginalized or drained. The jolt of satisfaction gotten from lashing out or sniping is powerful, and feeds the ego’s need to be right, and superior. But it doesn’t last. What lasts, is Klesha, described in Sanskrit as trap of suffering that can be eradicated only through awareness.
Conscious communication results from practicing a different response in challenging situations. This is done by noticing how the mind races to assumptions and judgments, and how strong negative feelings follow those thoughts. Stopping the mind, and giving the fearful or angry emotion some space, can be done in a matter of seconds. The technique’s effectiveness is increased with slow deep breathing.
Gradually, a shift occurs in which you realize that what you thought you so desperately needed from others, was within your power to give yourself, all along. Interactions and conversations will then initiate from a point of power, not need, and a place of giving, not getting.
Making this shift means fully living up to, and modeling, communication and service leadership.
Differentiate Your Professional Service Practice
December 4, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Leave a Comment
Photo credit: Wessex Archaeology's photostream (coastal and marine set) on Flickr
I get asked over and over by some people about what kind of coaching and consulting I do. They seem to have a preconceived notion, or perception of it and then attempt to reconcile my explanation to somehow fit their worldview. Sometimes I can’t figure out if they’re curious and trying and wanting to understand, or just not listening.
But now I’m realizing that people are pulled out of their comfort level when they’re in the depths, and the depths is my space.
I work with people at the level of often hidden assumptions, expectations and beliefs. In organizations, its collections of those - the culture. I use metaphysical metaphors to support the change facilitation process. I shouldn’t be surprised that people want to stick their toe in the water many times before they risk getting a touch of the bends.
I’m blogging this because I’m getting a sense that there’s a growing desire, or movement, or response to series of crises, to go deeper: in life, business and self-awareness. I think its a great sign that people and businesses are showing willingness and readiness to move beyond the surface of their experience, and with a leap in faith, take the plunge into what’s deep and unknown…that with which we identify but which contradicts what we want and where we want to go.
I don’t believe that “going deep” is only within the realm of professionals who focus on “people” issues. Accountants, consultants, health professionals, lawyers, technology professionals, etc, can practice recognizing opportunities to serve clients at a deeper level. It starts with allowing more space for conversation and sharing, being present without an agenda, and being willing to think differently about everything we and our clients think we know.
Uncertainty is the new reality for our clients. We can help them make it their pivot point of power from which they can create and direct their change and growth, if we dare to be different.
Business and Social Media: A Non-linear Process
November 16, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Leave a Comment
Social Media:Community Snapshot
Social media will increasingly become more important to businesses that must find new ways to gain influence and increase attention share in peer-to-peer (friends) networks.
However, the strategies being developed to help companies accomplish this are often loosely based on a traditional sales and marketing funnel analogy, identifying community members as:
- visitors
- prospects
- leads
- opportunities
- customers
The funnel goal is to focus efforts on the people who are most likely to be influenced to take action and move them through the funnel.
This is an effective social network model but is based on assumptions that are not applicable for many businesses. The graphic simply illustrates a non-linear social community model as a connected group of people, including a tiny percentage who talk and a very large percentage who listen only, and who all have latent needs. Often, that’s it!
In this model, people (peers) who listen only to other people (peers and brand) may be just as likely to be influenced as the small percentage of people (peers) who talk. And there’s no way of knowing what the brand (people) can do to facilitate that. It requires experiential learning.
Because many communities look and act like this, its critical that business social media strategies differentiate assumptions from myths and not base their quest for quantitative metrics and ROI on those myths. Its harder to do that than it sounds because we individually and collectively (culture) identify with what’s worked in the past. Its what we “know”.
But success could mean testing many assumptions about the 95% of community members who listen only, and learning how to earn their attention and better understand them. Compared to traditional marketing methods, its a less clear, test and learn approach, dependent more on time than money. But that should not mean a casual or haphazard, half-hearted approach to social media.
Regardless of how tentative you feel about it, or how small you start, take it seriously. This is the future, and whatever the size of your business, an important decision you’ll make and change that you’ll lead.
Status Matters To Change Success
April 25, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · 1 Comment
Today I read something that brought up a memory so uncomfortable that I had largely repressed it. I was working as a strategy consultant for a growing company trying to get itself bought. We were a tight-knit group and although the bloom was fading from the dot-com rose, it was a mostly optimistic organization. In an effort to make everything look as professional and capable as possible to investors, there were frequent re-organizations, mostly designed by people who had never previously heard the word.
I was the last one called in to be briefed on the last re-org before the company was sold. The owner who I was meeting with looked pained and was nervously chattering. He started going down the org chart…and down….and down… And there I was, not just at the bottom but barely even connected to anything, like an org chart dangling participle. My response was visceral and I thought at the time, totally out of proportion to the event. I was assured that I was highly valued and respected (and I was well compensated and got good projects). It was just that they “didn’t know where to put me”. And I could see why. I was happy to jump from project, to account, to consulting. I cared little about politics or management and always preferred to do creative work, rather than manage others doing creative work. I was, am and always have been a creative, entrepreneurial generalist.
So why could I not get past it? To everyone’s surprise I left very shortly thereafter although it required relocation for a new position. Although I’ve stayed in touch with many of the people on that dreaded org chart, I never again spoke to, talked about or even looked at the person I met with that day. But I killed the messenger many times in my fantasies while at the same time beating myself up over my big fat jealous childish ego.
So today I read about a new NIMH study of the brain, specifically the medial prefontal cortex (involved in sizing up others), the striatum (the reward center) and the amygdala and posterior cingulate (emotional pain processing). The researchers scanned the brains of participants involved with a game that resulted in reward and loss of both money and status/reputation.
“We found that the brain reacts very strongly to the other players and specifically the status of the other players,” Zink says. “We weren’t expecting that profound a response,” she adds, noting that the subjects seemed to be concerned with the hierarchy within the game even when it was of no consequence to how much money they could make.
So now I understand; mine was a normal brain reaction to a perceived loss of status even though I was never a person who cared about titles or climbing the corporate ladder. But this new knowledge is even more important to me as a change facilitator and executive coach because either real or perceived loss of status is a major factor that should be considered and communicated when leading large organizational or small business change. Leaders who can increase their own awareness and emotional IQ about the impact of status change on their people and culture, will more effectively help others through, and consequently increase the success likelihood of, their change programs.
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leadership, organizational culture, self-awareness
RedShift eBook - The Seven Virtues of Change Leadership
January 2, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
How Executives Will Fill the Leadership Chasm and Transform Their Organizations
This is my first eBook and a labor of love created during the dead of winter 2008. My goal is simply to create a spark in people who are leading change initiatives, perhaps for the first time.
You can either download the pdf version or view the single page web version.
Download pdf file (1.1 mb)
Web version (no download)
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